Chinua Achebe Quotes

There is that great proverb — that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.

I think fiction recues history from its confusions.

Now, there are some who would like to rewrite history - revisionist historians is what I like to call them.

There is no such thing as a final draft of history.

We often do not get the first draft of history right.

Every historian has a vested interest. "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" was not about the Roman but the British empire. What price the truth?

Historical novels are, without question, the best way of teaching history, for they offer the human stories behind the events and leave the reader with a desire to know more.

I've always loved history and history is collage, it is a juxtaposition of the good and the bad and the strange, and how you place those sentences together changes the whole mood of a history.

History is not what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago; it's a story about what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago.

Great historians can make the discovery of the real story more exciting than the romantic myth. Stacy Schiff, a great historian as well as a wonderful writer, peels away the layers to reveal the true Cleopatraa much more interesting woman than the Hollywood version and, as it turns out, a formidable queen after all.

History may never have all the facts, but history always has the last word.

History is not another name for the past, as many people imply. It is the name for stories about the past.

I have a hard time with historians because they idolize the truth. The truth is not uplifting; it destroys. I could tell most of the secretaries in the church office building that they are ugly and fat. That would be the truth, but it would hurt and destroy them. Historians should tell only that part of the truth that is inspiring and uplifting.

History is a novel that has been lived, a novel is history that could have been.

History is often not what actually happened but what is recorded as such.

History is, in its essence, exciting; to present it as dull is, to my mind, stark and unforgivable misrepresentation.

I have a multivolume history of the world from the 19th century that begins with Noah's flood as though it's as historical a fact as the rise and fall of Rome.

It is part of my creed that the only poetry is history, could we tell it right.

History is an illogical record. It hinges on nothing. It is a story that changes, and has accidents, and recovers with scars.

I think I regard any history in quotes, because just like science, we're constantly revising science, we're constantly revising history.

History is the most dangerous product evolved from the chemistry of the intellect. ...History will justify anything. It teaches precisely nothing, for it contains everything and furnishes examples of everything.

There's no such thing as history, only historians. That's how we know about the past.

At a certain point one ceases to defend a certain view of history; one must defend history itself.

History, in the end, becomes a form of irony.

I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written.